Two words should be at the top of your technology wish list: Disaster recovery.

In today's work-from-everywhere landscape, your organization must be prepared for anything—from natural disasters like flood or fire to increasingly devastating cyberattacks like ransomware. A robust and up-to-date disaster recovery plan (and the preventative measures it includes) can offer the critical protection you need to prevent and minimize the impacts of a disaster on your business. Perhaps most importantly, a strong disaster recovery strategy will help you recover more fully and quickly—enabling you and your team to get back to business as usual. 

Despite this, businesses continue to fall short when it comes to disaster recovery. FEMA reports that one in five companies lack a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and one quarter of businesses do not reopen after experiencing a disaster.  

In this post, we share four key ways that disaster recovery can benefit your business, including: reduced downtime, enhanced cybersecurity, reputational protection, and safeguards against legal action.

Disaster Recovery to Reduce Downtime

Downtime is a dangerous thing for businesses of all sizes. Gartner suggests that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute and 98% of organizations report that an hour of downtime costs upwards of $100,000. Last year, Facebook suffered a six-hour outage that reportedly cost the company more than $60 million! 

SMBs are not immune, either. Any period of downtime can negatively impact your business, from upset customers to productivity drops to revenue loss. In fact, the concept of “downtime cost” typically includes not just profit loss but also reputational damage, data loss (and fraud), and missed opportunities (like customer acquisition and retention). By one account, nearly half of online customers will leave a website if it doesn’t load within two seconds. 

An effective disaster recovery strategy means that you can quickly recover your backed up files to limit your downtime and get back to normal business. Which means you can minimize the risks of downtime—you’ll limit profit loss, protect your reputation, and retain your critical customers.

Disaster Recovery to Minimize Cyber Threats

Technology is not 100% fail proof and it never will be; accidental technology failures happen all the time. But what happens when intentional and nefarious actors are the cause of your downtime? It’s a much scarier scenario—in part, because it’s a much scarier world out there for SMBs. Last year, 56% of organizations around the world suffered a ransomware attack. The landscape isn’t much better this year due to new and emerging threats; targeted, relentless attacks; hybrid and remote work environments; and steep ransoms. 

Backing up your data in a secure and redundant environment has never been more important. With the right disaster recovery solution in place, your backup environment will be as safe as possible from hackers, should they attempt to attack your business and harm your reputation (one survey suggests that a quarter of customers will stop engaging with a business after it suffers a data breach). 

Disaster Recovery to Avoid Reputational Damage

Reputation matters. By one account, 25% of your market value comes directly from your reputation and what your customers think of your business. A positive customer experience with your product or service is a key differentiator in an increasingly noisy and competitive marketplace. As we mentioned above, one of the costs of downtime as a result of disaster is your brand reputation. Research suggests that nearly 40% of SMBs have lost customers due to downtime; it’s also well-known that it costs significantly more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. 

Downtime from disaster affects your internal customers as well—your employees. It can negatively impact business processes, hinder communications, and lead to frustration at the workplace. These internal struggles often leach out to customer interactions. Between social media and unending media cycles, words spread quickly these days. Internal or external reports of downtime can generate negative press coverage, which can be hard to recover from. 

Disaster Recovery to Avoid Legal Action

Lastly, a strong disaster recovery strategy can help you avoid costly and time-consuming legal scenarios along two fronts. First, if you experience significant downtime as a result of a disaster, customers or partners may feel the negative impact of this from an experiential or revenue perspective. In some cases, these individuals or businesses could seek out compensation or legal damages to rectify the loss they experienced. Having a disaster recovery plan in place will help you minimize downtime and reduce the likelihood that things escalate to this point.

Second, depending on the industry and location you work in, you may need to comply with various data protection policies, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which includes a data backup and recovery mandate. A disaster recovery plan can help ensure compliance to these policies, on top of all the other benefits.

We hope this post illuminates just a few of the benefits you’ll experience when you implement a disaster recovery plan for your business. If you lack a proper plan now, you’re not alone: one study suggests that a fifth of SMBs don’t feel prepared to address and prevent unplanned downtime.

But you don’t have to be among this cohort. Get in touch with N8 Solutions today for a free assessment. You’ll be well on your way to reaping the benefits of a robust, customizable, and affordable disaster recovery strategy. We can’t plan when or how disaster will strike, but we certainly can prepare for one!

Please reach out to book a free assessment or get in touch with us anytime to voice your questions and concerns. Please call (262) 288-1501 or complete this form.